University of Dundee
The Ungrateful Muse Cook, Daniel
Published in: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
DOI: 10.1111/1754-0208.12464
Publication date: 2017
Document Version Peer reviewed version
Link to publication in Discovery Research Portal
Citation for published version (APA): Cook, D. (2017). The Ungrateful Muse: Jonathan Swift's ‘A Panegyrick on the Dean’ and Other Poems. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40(3), 363-380. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12464
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Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 The Ungrateful Muse: Jonathan Swift’s A Panegyrick on the Dean and
Other Poems
Wearied by a long career of vexing, Swift, then in his sixties, spent eight solid months, from early
June 1728 to early February 1729, at the home of Sir Arthur and Lady Anne Acheson in Market
Hill near Armagh, and returned fleetingly for the next two summers.1 ‘I was dwindled to a writer of
libels on the lady of the family where I lived’, he wrote to Pope, ‘and upon myself’.2 However,
during these visits he produced more than twenty poems, many of them lengthy, and some key
political tracts that extended his burgeoning reputation as the Hibernian Patriot in his late period.3
Having read Pope’s Dunciad more than twenty times by the summer of 1728, by his own claim,
Swift spent his rural retirement writing his own duncical epics in miniature, quietly answering his
rivals, not least of all a vainglorious dean-poet rival from Dublin, Jonathan Smedley, author of a
fraudulent fourth volume of the Pope-Swift Miscellanies, Gulliveriana (1728), and the poetic
clergyman Patrick Delany, among others.4
An indiscriminately allusive, aggressively intertextual poem, ‘A Panegyrick on the Dean, in
the Person of a Lady in the North’ is, I wish to suggest, both an audacious celebration of Swift’s
public life in writing and an alienating mock-panegyric that quietly, condescendingly queries his
continued relevance as a political commentator (‘My grateful Muse / Salutes the D—n in diff’rent
Views’). The first half of this essay outlines the comically fraught relationship between the
doddering tutor in semi-retirement (the Dean) and the reluctant Swiftian student (the Lady) as a
dramatic representation of the author’s seemingly dwindling career in what he suggests is an
inhospitable, anti-intellectual environment. The second part demonstrates Swift’s invasive
intertextuality as a strategy of authorial safeguarding against the challenges from the antagonistic
Smedley or even the outwardly more benign Delany. In foolhardily attempting to prolong his career
by indoctrinating his hostess, a confessed hater of books, in building an unseemly outhouse to mark
his diminished value in Ireland, and in refusing to be bettered by rival satirists, Swift ironically
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Cook, D. (2017) "The Ungrateful Muse: Jonathan Swift's 'A Panegryick on the Dean' and other Poems", Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40:3, pp. 363-380, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12464. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. commemorates himself as a mere writer of libels. Through a ventriloquized disciple, Lady Anne,
Swift endorses further his vexatious style by hypocritically – knowingly – plundering a panoply of sources ranging from Virgil and Horace through to Behn, Eusden, and other unlikely figures. He does so not to excise them from his extended canon but to purify his own remains in a temple of shame, an Irish tribute to the goddess of the sewer, Cloacina. Urbanised, grubby immortality defeats an artificial timelessness in a compromised pastoral setting.
The Lady and the Dean
The fictive relationship between Swift and Anne Acheson is best characterised as a quarrelsome intimacy. In ‘Lady Acheson Weary of the Dean’, apparently written in the autumn of the first residency, the Lady irritably, albeit in measured tones, seeks to rid her home of the unwelcome poet in residence:
After a Week, a Month, a Quarter,
And Day succeeding after Day,
Says not a Word of his Departure
Tho’ not a Soul would have him stay. (9-12)5
Meanwhile, in ‘Daphne’, Swift implies that the Lady is by nature prone to needless needling, despite being capable of using her judgement:
Daphne knows, with equal ease,
How to vex and how to please;
But, the folly of her sex
Makes her sole delight to vex. […]
To dispute, her chief delight,
2 With not one opinion right:
Thick her arguments she lays on,
And with cavils combats reason. (1-12)
Within the plush confines of the Achesons’ home Swift revels in the pantomimic potential made available when abruptly flipping between caricatured impressions of himself, as the doddering
Dean, and the frisky Lady, a would-be Swiftian vexer. ‘My Lady’s Lamentation and Complaint
Against the Dean’, perhaps the first major Market Hill poem to be written (on or around 28 July
1728), establishes a number of recurrent ideas found throughout the series. Running over 226 short lines, the poem combines the conversational briskness of Skelton with the child-like grotesqueness of Lilliputian verse.6 In the first fourteen lines the Lady (here disguising herself under the name
Nancy) outlines her lamentable position in the home as a teased wretch at the hands of the Dean and a Knight (her husband):
To punish my sins,
Sir Arthur begins,
And gives me a wipe
With Skinny and Snipe:
His malice is plain,
Hallooing the Dean. (5-10)
The rapidity of the lines captures the brute cruelty of the Knight, cruelty that Swift associates with himself in a later poem, ‘Lady Acheson Weary of the Dean’:
Must I be every Moment chid
With skinny, boney, snip and lean,
3 Oh! that I could but once be rid
Of that insulting Tyrant Dean. (41-44)
When reading the works collectively, we can see that the Dean’s strategy all along was to use the insulting labels so often that they would lose their potency (‘Sir A—r, since you set the
Pattern, / No longer calls me Snipe and Slattern’), as the Lady implies in a late Market Hill poem,
‘A Panegyrick on the Dean, in the Person of a Lady in the North’. Whereas the Knight is cruel seemingly to no purpose, the Dean’s vexing points towards his hostess’s “improvement” in ‘My
Lady’s Lamentation’. Before the Dean’s residency, the Lady often ‘sat with delight, / From morning till night’, a bundle of the misdirected energy that typifies the Burtonian melancholic
(‘scratching my nose, / And jogging my toes’).7 Now, under the Dean’s tutelage, she is instead
‘over-run’ by intellectual wordplay and tiring walks (‘To lengthen my breath / He tires me to death’). After a brief diversion in which ‘He rails at my person’, taking her to pieces ‘From shoulder to flank’, at turns caricaturing (‘My nose, long and thin, / Grows down to my chin’) before brutally de-sexing her body (‘To ’scape them, Sir Arthur / Is forc’d to lie farther, / Or his sides they would gore / Like the tusk of a boar’). Next, abruptly ‘changing the scene’, the Lady delivers what is perhaps the central message of the poem in a couplet that prods awkwardly, and therefore effectively, out of the page: ‘He loves to be bitter at / A lady illiterate’. And so begins the painful drudgery of her educative reform across the Market Hill series. She is read like a book in need of repair:
If he sees her but once,
He’ll swear she’s a dunce;
Can tell by her looks
A hater of books:
Thro’ each line of her face
4 Her folly can trace […]
Wise books and reflection
Will mend the complexion. (92-102)
Although disembodied, there remains a curious, contradictory gendering of the Lady, as the Dean suggests that ‘If you are inclin’d / To polish your mind’ she will ‘Be ador’d by the men / ’Till threescore and ten’. That is, by educating herself she will defeat her womanly vulnerability to aging and physical decay. By imitating the Swiftian art of vexation she will ‘kill with the spleen / The jades of sixteen’; instead, ‘The wits will frequent ye, / And think you but twenty’. Favouring her mind over her body, that is, she will appear both attractive and youthful to male admirers – at least, according to the male author behind the female persona.
The Lady might wonder if the Knight’s cruel if directionless taunts would be preferable after all. Having waded through ‘Dull Bacon’s Essays’ and pored over ‘That nasty Pantheon’, she ponders whether ‘’Twere better [to] be blind / Than thus be confin’d’. If the Lady is a reluctant reader, the Dean is arguably a deluded one, or at least he is comically out of place in his anti- intellectual surroundings. Taking leave of ‘study or pray’r’, sauntering ‘With labourers bant’ring’,
Swift (or rather, the Dean) tests his bookish wit out in the field:
How broadly he talks
Of zigzacks and walks […]
And boasts of his feats,
His grottos and seats; […]
A hole where a rabbit
Would scorn to inhabit,
Dug out in an hour,
He calls it a bow’r. (173-186)
5
Much to the amusement of the residents, however, the poetic bower is soon befouled by ‘a wild calf
/ Come, driven by heat’. They watch as the clergyman runs to ‘his arbor for shelter, / Where all goes to ruin / The Dean has been doing’. The failure to build adequate property at Market Hill is of course a major theme of the larger verse collection, not least of all the incompleteness of the
Drapier’s Hill project. And the defecating maids – who ‘leave something behind: / No more need be said on’t, / I smell when I tread on’t’ – would become a staple in such poems as ‘A Panegyrick on the Dean, in the Person of a Lady in the North’, where the outhouse temples built in honour of the goddess of the sewer, Cloacina, take up lengthy descriptive passages.
If the Dean’s role in ‘My Lady’s Lamentation’ is that of the bad-tempered if childlike tutor, in ‘Panegyrick’, another poem written from the perspective of Anne Acheson, his roles are multiplied:
My grateful Muse
Salutes the D—n in diff’rent Views;
D—n, Butler, Usher, Jester, Tutor. (37-39)
As Louise K. Barnett argues, ‘The order is essentially anticlimactic, but tutor appears mixed in with the various serving positions […] lower than the butler, but higher than the dairy-man’.8 Charitably, one could make a case for the emphasis placed on the role of tutor, the rhyming word, given due prominence as the culminating item in the list. Certainly, though, Swift heaps bathos onto Pope’s grander list in The Dunciad: ‘O thou! Whatever Title please thine Ear / Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver’. The Lady’s ‘grateful Muse’ has no interest in Swift’s noteworthy alter-egos, and instead displaces the loftily heroic Drapier with the more hands-on role of butler, the bitingly satirical Bickerstaff with the diminished dual roles of usher and jester, and, finally, Swift’s authorship of Gulliver’s Travels with the heavily reduced role of live-in tutor. Readers might be led
6 to mock the Lady for failing to grasp the importance of her houseguest, or they might think of the lines as a commentary on the perceived failures of an Irish patriot poet when set against the
Scriblerians’ London-centric critique of Grub Street hacks.9 After all, there is a creative tension in
Swift’s poem between bookish allusions to Pope, Gay and other English poets and the highly localised references to the people and places of Market Hill.
By putting the poem in the voice of ‘a Lady in the North’, Swift is able to explore through proxy the ‘suitable Returns’ his countrymen and countrywomen can offer him. In the proem, the opening 36 lines, he portrays the Dean as a lone standard-bearer of literary quality (‘Nine more such
Champions as the D—n, / Would soon restore our antient Reign’) and a hero among intellectual women (‘How well to win the Ladies Hearts, / You celebrate their Wit and Parts!’). At the same time, the Lady – speaking on behalf of her entire sex and her nation – is ‘Impatient to be out of
Debt’. To repay him, she seeks ‘the Printer’s Boy below: / Ye Hawkers all, your Voices lift; / A
Panegyrick on D—n S—’. Her attempts to fabricate a tangible, textual response to the Dean speaks to what Deborah Baker Wyrick has called conservative textocentrism, an agitated wish to capture in print the testimonies that would otherwise be lost (‘O, may I never once forget’, says Lady
Acheson, ‘The Bard’).10 To be clear, Swift’s poem seems to operate as both an underhanded commemoration of himself and an alienating mock-panegyric in which his mechanical survey, as
Barnett puts it, ‘parodies the methodical catalogue of a serious panegyric, not only in form but in content’.11 This duality is evidenced for Ehrenpreisian critics who place the poem in the context of notable scatological poems such as ‘Strephon and Chloe’ and ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’. In such works, Thomas B. Gilmore Jr. suggests, Swift satirizes ‘the stale conventions of love songs’ or gentlemen who love ladies for their ‘cosmetic powers’.12 For Edward R. Cronin, similarly, ‘the ever-present nymphs and goddesses that people the Arcardian landscape deceive the reader whose senses have been dulled by the conventions of pastoral poetry’.13 Readers accustomed to such banalities would be at once seduced and repulsed by the culminating description of two latrines on the estate in such passages as the following, which caught Geoffrey Hill’s attention:
7
Yet, some Devotion still remains
Among our harmless Northern Swains;
Whose Off’rings plac’t in golden Ranks,
Adorn our chrystal River’s Banks:
Nor seldom grace the flow’ry downs,
With spiral Tops and Copple-Crowns:
Or gilding in a sunny Morn
The humble Branches of a Thorn. (299-308)
The stretched rhythms that piece together the scratchy consonants (‘chrystal River’s Banks’) compete against the delicate simplicity of the more conventional pastoral phrases (‘gilding in a sunny Morn’), thereby marking out in poetic terms the inappropriateness of the style and subject matter. For Hill, the poem’s tonality suggests that ‘Swift is writing, not out of fascinated disgust or angry contempt, but under the obligation to amuse […] [A]ny plea of parody is really an alibi for the indulgence of a taste that is itself more dubious than “straight” pastoral’.14 Gilmore takes a contrary line: ‘It is part of the human comedy, as innocent and harmless as the rustics who drop it; and it is easily cleaned off. This resolution may lack the excitement of a Swift neurotically wallowing in excrement […] but in its quiet key, it is eminently in keeping with the good sense that he never tired of recommending’.15 To take this argument further, in the proem Lady Acheson positions her ‘artless Muse’ against that ‘awkward Shame / Affected by each vulgar Dame; / To
Modesty a weak Pretence’. Instead she displays a Swiftian boldness that flies in the teeth of politeness: ‘To show my Face with scornful Air; / Let others match it if they dare’. The Lady celebrates Swift by emulating her tutor from the very beginning. Indeed, the opening of the poem is marked by the author’s habitual decisiveness (‘Resolv’d my Gratitude to show’), suggesting that her
8 indoctrination is nearing completion, and the Dean’s artistic legacy assured through his impersonation of a protégée.
Against Hill’s suggestion that Swift struggles to fulfil an ‘obligation to amuse’, I want to tease out a further strain of vexing within the poem’s manifesto as part of the Lady’s training as a domesticated – rather than a public – Swiftian panegyrist. (Written during his last visit to Market
Hill, this poem represents a culmination of a loosely enacted training programme that began in earnest with ‘My Lady’s Lamentation’, I have been suggesting).16 The art of vexing thrives on restraint as much as it does on a sharpened wit. As Swift says of himself in the voice of Lady
Acheson, he always judged ‘so nicely to a Hair / How far to go, and when to spare’. His illustrative example here signals a departure from the harsher lessons learned in ‘My Lady’s Lamentation’, as
Barnett sets out: ‘The bad-tempered and overexacting tutor of the “Lamentation” becomes the good-tempered and gentle instructor of the “Panegyrick”, but just as the extreme portraits of the
“Lamentation” are undercut by the speaker’s unreliability, the assertions of the “Panegyrick” are qualified by irony’. ‘It would be difficult to mistake the “Panegyrick’s” heavy-handed praise for genuine compliment’, she continues, in such overly formal lines as ‘I thus begin. My grateful muse
[…]’17 Other critics, such as Cronin, have also been quick to point out that Lady Acheson (in the poem) ‘seems to have no illusions about the nature of Swift’s unstinting praise’.18
Likewise, we should not be fooled by the Lady’s praise of the Dean’s preaching (‘How nice you split the hardest Text!’) when we consider that, according to Faulkner’s intrusive editorial note,
‘The Author preached but once while he was there’. The style of delivery (‘so clear, and so concise’) threatens to obscure the subject matter. And the extended discussion of his outward appearance (‘So nicely clad from Head to Heel; / So fine a Gown, a Band so clean, / As well become St. P—k’s D—n’) seems calculated to impress doltish young cowherds as much as to celebrate the Dean’s standing as a preacher. When describing Swift’s role as a Jester, similarly, the
Lady focuses on his purported skillset over his achievements: ‘With such Dexterity you fit / Their sev’ral Talents to your Wit’. As a Tutor, his success is measured by the effect of his lessons on the
9 ‘Neighbours who come here to dine’ who ‘Admire to hear me speak so fine’. The Lady’s learning is revealed to be paper-thin, after all, as she wrenches a rhyme that shows an eagerness to namedrop and to push her vocabulary beyond its limits when outlining the perceived envy of other female readers in their voice: ‘She’s grown so nice, and so penurious, / With Socratus and Epicurius
[Epicurus]’. The effect of the satire is compromised here as at least three voices are involved: is
Swift lampooning the pretensions of the tutee, or is the tutee masterfully mocking the unlearned ladies? The misapplication of the word penurious – which, according to the Canting Dictionary, is closer in meaning to parsimonious than to ‘nice, and dainty’, which Faulkner (a fourth voice) claims in a gloss is a definition favoured by ‘Ignorant Ladies’ – might be taken as a dig at either party, after all. In any case, the Lady presents herself as a modest reader, ‘duller than a Post’, eager to learn (‘So gentle in your whole Proceeding, / That I could spend my Life in reading’) and capable of elementary punning (‘Poor I, a Savage bred and born’, a reference to her maiden name).
She also comes up with a decent analogy between the labour-intensive butter-churning practiced in her household and the difficulties associated with wholly original, non-derivative poetry-making:
Three Morning-Hours you toss and shake
The Bottle, till your Fingers ake:
Hard is the Toil, nor small the Art […]
Your Rev’rence thus, with like Success,
Nor is your Skill, or Labour less,
When bent upon some smart Lampoon,
You toss and turn your Brain till Noon; [...]
While nothing comes but Froth at first,
You think your giddy Head will burst:
But, squeezing out four Lines in Rhime,
10 Are largely paid for all your time. (179-96)
This passage revisits a larger theme of the poem whereby writing is described in highly physical, even affective terms. In the proem Lady Acheson both alludes to the oral origins of Swift’s coterie verse (‘Behind my Back, before my Nose, / He sounds my Praise in Verse and Prose’) and describes a strong yearning to capture her sentiments in print (‘My Heart with Emulation burns / To make you suitable Returns’). But the passage quoted above brings to the fore a more fundamental physicality. Many critics, including Ellen Pollak, have described the lines as masturbatory (‘But, with his Hand, the D—n can churn it’).19 Instead I read the lines in equally sophomoric terms: the strain of ‘squeezing out’ new verse is likened to ‘squeeze[ing] an Ounce at least’ of butter, and both acts are likened to difficult bowel movements – ‘Rev’rence’ being a pun on sir-reverence, a corruption of salva reverentia (‘saving your reverence’ in Medieval Latin) and henceforward a euphemism for human faeces, used again twenty-five lines later (‘when she feels an inward Motion,
/ Comes fill’d with Rev’rence and Devotion’), and the Dean positioned at the toilet as at his desk
‘bent upon some smart Lampoon’. In the most graphic manner imaginable, Swift outlines the intrusion of the public perception of authors into their private domain of composition. Swift might also have had in mind John Oldham’s feisty lines on the perils of living by the brain while in poorly paid, monotonous employment as a school usher:
For when you’ve toil’d, and labour’d all you can,
To dung, and cultivate a barren Brain,
A Dancing-Master shall be better paid,
Tho’ he instructs the Heels, and you the Head.20
Pursued in private, intellectual dunging for both Oldham and Swift is unappealing but vitally necessary for original thought. More damagingly for a poet-priest, Swift reduces to base functions
11 the spiritual imagery of Milton’s Christian epic (‘By quick instinctive motion’) and George
Wither’s Epithalamia (‘felt you not an inward motion / Tempting you to yield devotion’). Swift might also have in mind a passage in John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in which the philosopher dwells at length on the adverse effects of ‘Going to Stool’ too regularly. ‘People that are very loose’, he cautions, ‘have seldom strong Thoughts, or strong Bodies’, before listing the ways in which one might learn to follow a daily routine and thereby regulate one’s health and therefore one’s thoughts.21 ‘You think your giddy Head will burst’, exclaims the Lady, either inadvertently or sarcastically equating the Dean’s labours will dullness, for Swift himself had made a similar connection in a slightly earlier poem, ‘On Burning a Dull Poem’: ‘I found my head began to swim, / A numbness crept through every limb’. Common-sense thinking does not necessarily produce great poetry, so we might infer, but great poetry cannot be produced without it. Swift lays bare the concerns felt by any number of elderly poets in retirement: the increasingly toilsome habits of composition, the success of younger or surviving rivals, and the vulnerability of hard-won reputation, among other things. After all, where are the monuments to Swift’s fame, and who will commemorate his legacy after he has gone? What has become of the Lady’s grateful muse?
Laying Waste
In a pronounced passage stuffed with allusions, parodies and jabs at himself and rival poets, Swift takes Lockean toileting a step further by raising two outhouses of ‘magnifick size’ in the name of
Cloacina, the goddess of the sewer (cloaca) and an instrument of purification (cluere, to purge).
With these debased temples to his own fame, Wyrick argues, Swift is able ‘to safeguard satirically his name, his texts, and his memory’ through a pre-emptive strike, using ‘his texts to wipe the world’s posteriors’ and defiling his own reputation on his own terms.22 Swift takes Cloacina from
John Gay’s London (‘Goddess of the Tide / Whose sable Streams beneath the City glide’) and relocates her to rural Ireland (‘Here, gentle Goddess Cloacine / Receives all Off’rings at her Shrine
[…]’) in an extended rejection of the pastoral ideals later outlined in ‘Strephon and Chloe’:
12
Adieu to ravishing delights,
High raptures, and romantic flights;
To goddesses so heavenly sweet,
Expiring shepherds at their feet;
To silver meads, and shady bowers,
Dressed up with amaranthine flowers. (197-202)
Seemingly mocking his diminished role as a mere coterie poet and live-in tutor in the service of the
Lady of the North, Swift equates his poems, love letters, and the works of his ‘conceited’ Dubliner dean-poet rival Jonathan Smedley, with waste paper:
Ye who frequent this hallow’d Scene,
Be not ungrateful to the D—n;
But, duly e’er you leave your Station,
Offer to him a pure Libation;
Or of his own, or Smedly’s Lay
Or Billet-doux, or Lock of Hay:
And, O! may all who hither come,
Return with unpolluted Thumb. (217-24)23
Seeking instead to ‘raise my Style’, the Lady enters upon an allusion-heavy account of her experimentation with different verse styles. She practices pastoral language:
There, many a Flow’r abstersive grew,
Thy fav’rite Flow’rs of yellow Hue. (249-50)
13
She tries out allegorical poetry:
Then Gluttony with greasy Paws,
Her Napkin pinn’d up to her Jaws. (255-56)
And she mimics with ease Dantean horror:
This bloated Harpy sprung from Hell,
Confin’d Thee Goddess to a Cell:
Sprung from her Womb that impious Line,
Contemners of thy Rites divine. (269-72)
The physicality of these allusions gathers a particular vividness in the depiction of an ironic Golden
Age of open-air defecation.24 An unacknowledged borrowing from Paradise Lost, the ‘crude consistence’ upon which the Lady treads in the open fields surrounding her pushes the reader to make a grand connection with the indeterminate nonsubstance that Satan makes his way through in
Milton’s cosmic Chaos:
Quenched in a boggy Syrtis, neither sea,
Nor good dry land: nigh foundered on he fares,
Treading the crude consistence […]
(Paradise Lost, 2.939-42)
Gratuitous snippet allusions to notable classics come thick and fast, including Virgil’s Aeneid (‘So
Poets sing, with golden Bough / The Trojan Heroe paid his Vow’) and Eclogues (‘Me Phoebus
14 […]’ recalling ‘Cynthius aurem Vellit’) and Horace’s Satires (‘[…] in a midnight Dream’ recalling
‘Post mediam noctem visus cum somnia vera’). The Lady quietly invokes Anchises’s words to his son Aeneas (‘Hae tibi erunt artes’) in the lines ‘Be these thy Arts; nor higher Aim / Than what befits a rural Dame’). But it is modern writers that shape, and ultimately contaminate, her ‘ambitious
Muse’ – a mocking reference to the poet laureate Laurence Eusden’s A Poem Humbly Inscribed to the Queen, which had been published fairly recently (in 1727). Swift’s poem itself ends with a baffling double naming of a humourless rival:
But, Cloacina Goddess bright,
Sleek, — claims her as his Right:
And Smedley, Flow’r of all Divines,
Shall sing the D—n in Smedley’s Lines. (343-6)
Pointedly insisting that her muse must abruptly ‘stop’ and not ‘dwell on Subjects too sublime’, the
Lady’s counsel of self-imposed restraint and confinement, as Frederic V. Bogel argues, feels
‘pinched and chilling after the giddy pluralities of the preceding three hundred lines’, particularly in a poem that persistently celebrates the verbal palimpsest of impersonation and heterogeneous roleplaying of the Dean and his friends.25 Having given the task of praising Swift to the Lady – a capable Swiftian, it turns out – the final emphasis on Smedley’s dubious position in the poet’s textual legacy is calculatedly biting. Irvin Ehrenpreis dismisses the final quatrain about Smedley as
‘irrelevant’, while Pat Rogers calls the repetition of his name ‘pointless’.26 To be sure, the repetition is grammatically redundant, but what of its effects? One might say Swift rings some final comic value out of the inharmonious name by repeating it so that it sticks in our throats and rasps at our lips: Smedley, Smedley. Doubtless Swift picked up the trick from his repeated reading of The
Dunciad, in which Pope includes their mutual enemy in the mud-diving games of Book 2:
15 Next Smedley div’d; slow circles dimpled o’er
The quaking mud, that clos’d, and ope’d no more.
All look, all sigh, all call on Smedley lost;
Smedley in vain resounds thro’ all the coast.27
Swift’s repetition also overbears the curious blanked name for whom Swift finally claims
Cloacina. Bogel has some candidates in mind, but the poem has failed if judged solely as a work of textual conservation.28 Two of the most careful readings of ‘Panegyrick’ attend to this tension between excessive naming on the one hand and buried naming on the other. Both Wyrick and Mark
R. Blackwell treat the work as a commentary on textual loss caused by the appropriating habits of hacks and the perils of anonymous print culture. For me, the poem exposes but curiously champions the paradox of literary borrowing: the superfluous outgrowth of a toxic textuality that spills into and out of the confines of the demarcated page; in short, appropriation without the rights of ownership.
As Blackwell argues, ‘Panegyrick’ comes out of Swift’s excremental vision, so it is important to unpack the coeval etymological traditions underwriting that agenda: excrement, to sift out, to separate (Latin, ex+cernere), but also to grow out, to cultivate (ex+crescere). This doubled vision informs the poem’s shifting textualism of praise and ridicule, offering and removal.29 In
Blackwell’s schema Swift presents his corpus as one tainted by association with Smedley and other dunces, in a sort of textual contagion: ‘[‘Panegyrick’] reveals Swift’s recognition of – and resignation to – the fact that secure identity depends upon control of one’s various properties, a control harder to exercise in a modern world whose threats to integral identity find fullest expression in the vagaries of textual ascription in a messily vital print culture’.30 Certainly the last four lines of the poem complete the synthesis of Smedley, ‘flower of all divines’, as an indistinct symbol of tulip and dung – the basis of Swift’s own definition for the scatological satirist, which he would revisit most infamously in ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’: ‘He [Strephon] soon would learn to think like me, / And bless his ravisht Sight to see / Such Order from Confusion sprung, / Such
16 gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung’. Even the original title-page of ‘Panegyrick’ superficially levels out the Deans insofar as ‘D—n S—’ might refer to them interchangeably. Here and throughout the poem the strategy seems to be one of deliberately blurring literary property, perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that Swift had given up trying to shake off his barnacle-like rival with whom he had quarrelled in print since 1713. Crucially, he does so in permanently suspended terms, departing from the more threatening finality outlined in Smedley’s ‘Verses, Fix’d on the Cathedral Door, the
Day of Dean Gulliver’s Installment’ (written in 1713; revised in 1728). Smedley opens in harmlessly sarcastic terms (‘Today, this Temple gets a Dean, / Of Parts and Fame, uncommon’) but ends with a shockingly incendiary epitaph:
And now, whene’er his Deanship dies,
Upon his Tomb be ’graven;
A Man of God here buried lies,
Who never thought of Heaven.
In many of Swift’s Smedley poems he directly responds to a series of insults levelled at his standing as a writer and a clergyman, often by returning the opponent’s words to him. In a poorly printed sheet that may or may not have been written by Swift, ‘A Letter from Dean Swift to Dean
Smedley’, we find a prodding reply (‘Dear Dean, if e’re again you Write, / Beware of Subjects you call Trite’) that is built out of and yet rebuts Smedley’s blunt request in A Satyr (both 1725) that the
‘Most Reverent Dean’ should ‘cease to Write; / Nor longer dwell on Things so Trite’. Throughout
‘A Letter’, the poet (whether Swift or a close imitator) relentlessly lifts (and marks on the page in quarantined italics) a number of phrases from A Saytr, thereby lessening their satiric shock by the end of the text.31 Smedley, moreover, sarcastically calls Swift ‘our Isle’s Apollo’, and further claims that the god of poetry was tired of listening to his Irish viceroy. In retaliation Swift (or Swift’s ally) baldly states ‘I’m Apollo stil’d by you’, freeing himself from any charge of self-aggrandisement and
17 pushing attention back on the obsessive accuser. In ‘His Grace’s Answer to Jonathan’, Swift more aggressively hijacks Smedley’s appeals in An Epistle to his Grace the Duke of Grafton, Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland (both 1724) for a small sinecure to aid his retirement in a more favourable place than Clogher, where he was instituted as Dean.32 Where Smedley writes ‘St Patrick’s sawcy
Dean, / With Silver Verge, and Surplice clean […] / A Place he got, y’clyp’d a Stall’, Swift contemptuously rewrites the text as a humble boast in Smedley’s words (‘I hope to make you yet as clean, / As that same, viz. St P—k’s Dean. / I’ll give thee Surplice, Verge and Stall’), at once yoking the authors together and yet acknowledging Swift’s superiority. That is to say, not only does Swift lift lines from Smedley’s poem, he alludes to an array of his own pieces, including ‘Apollo’s Edict’,
‘Vanbrug’s House’, ‘Upon the South Sea Project’, and others. Placing their works side by side suggests Swift’s felt confident in his readers’ abilities to judge the gulf in quality, in the early 1720s at least.
However, in a 1729 poem, ‘Dean Smedley Gone to Seek His Fortune’, Swift forcibly distinguishes himself from the shameless hack who ‘waded without any shame, / Thro’ thick and thin, to get a name’.33 By this time, Swift would have learned from his many readings of Pope’s
Dunciad that the only sure way to break a rival’s corpus is to appropriate it under a flattened authorial sign. Otherwise the intact authorial sign would be prone to misuse, leaving it vulnerable to charges of indecency or plagiarism without anything being committed to print. As Smedley asserts,
‘I’ll e’en leave you buried in your own Rubbish, and the borrow’d Ruins of others’.34 Rather than burying Smedley in turn, Swift positions him prominently in the excessive outgrowth of his own self-panegyric, pre-plagiarising himself in the style of the other Dean amid a barrage of largely decorative, insubstantial allusions to the classics. In one sense, then, Swift fulfilled his dream of accomplishing (in miniature) ‘an Irish Dunciad, in imitation of that incomparable Duncepick Poem,
Written and Published, by the most Ingenious Mr. Pope against the Grub-street Scriblers of Great-
Brittain’.35 ‘Panegyrick’ names and shames Smedley, and bests him at his own games – this time by pre-empting rather than responding to specific attacks. That said, whether Swift knew it or not,
18 ‘Panegyrick’ belatedly extends ‘The Ode-Maker’, a work most likely written by Smedley, notwithstanding its a burlesque of Smedley’s own ‘Ode to Earl Cadogan’ (both 1719).36 Not only does Smedley (assuming he was the author of both texts) lengthen his own property, he opportunistically conjoins himself (Sm-y) with Swift during an unnecessarily prolonged critique of the latter’s style:
Tell us what Swift is now a doing;
Or whineing Politicks or Wooing; […]
Shew us, in sympathetic Strain,
The Twin-Conceit of Brother-Dean:
He’s always Odd, and always New,
Idle, and Humorous as You.
It is worth noting that Swift performed a similar trick with ‘An Epistle upon an Epistle’ as late as Christmas 1729: like Smedley, he smuggles an attack on his rival into a notional response to another poem, in this case Patrick Delany’s ‘An Epistle To His Excellency John Lord Carteret Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland’, which had just been printed:
Smedley, thou Jonathan of Clogher,
“When thou thy humble Lays do’st offer
To G—f—n’s Grace, with grateful Heart;
Thy Thanks and Verse, devoid of Art:
Content with what his Bounty gave,
No larger Income dost thou Crave.” (31-6)
19 Not content with naming his rival outright, Swift quotes at length (as indicated above) from
Smedley’s Epistle to Grafton.37 A sideswipe at Smedley in Smedley’s own words becomes a warning to his friend, Delany, who seems to be on the same path to indecent wares-showing. Like
Smedley, as the quotations remind us, Delany had publicly sought in verse additional ecclesiastical preferment. And like Smedley, Delany had dwelt on the unseemliness of his surroundings in
Glasnevin, as Swift reiterates anew (‘Your Assets fail, and Cash is wanting / For farther Buildings, farther Planting’). As he progresses through his concerns Swift seems to lose patience with his fellow poet (‘a low Hibernian bard’), mocking ambitions that perhaps uncomfortably remind him of his own attempts to concretise a legacy in Ireland:
To Fame a Temple you Erect,
A Flora does the Dome protect;
Mounts, Walks, on high; and in a Hollow
You place the Muses and Apollo;
There shining ’midst his Train, to Grace
Your Whimsical, Poetick Place. (77-82)
If Delany had read ‘His Grace’s Answer to Jonathan’, incidentally, he might have detected a loose reworking of Swift’s harsher critique of Smedley’s misjudged valuation of his own merits as a clergyman and a poet:
While others wrack their busy Brains,
You are not in the least at Pains.
Down to your Deanery repair
And build a Castle in the Air. (17-20)
20 Attempting to silence his friend for his own sake, Swift might equally have been protecting himself, again, from the wrong kind of attention. After all, Delany namedrops the Dean’s good name in his epistle (‘Circled with SWIFT, and some delighted Friends; / When mixing Mirth and
Wisdom with your Wine’). More damningly, perhaps, Delany seems to position himself as a currently benign Swiftian satirist in waiting, ready to usurp his complacent elder:
[…] when the Dean, long privileg’d to rail,
Asserts his Friend with more impetuous Zeal;
You hear, (whilst I sit by abash’d and mute)
With soft Concessions shortning the Dispute; […]
Suppose at such a Time, I took the Freedom
To speak these Truths, as plainly as you read ’em. (15-26)
‘Take this Advice then from your Friend’, Swift insists in his retaliatory epistle: ‘To Your Ambition put an End’. He continues, ‘Be Modest: nor Address your Betters / With Begging, Vain, Familiar
Letters’. Ostensibly delivering sound career advice, Swift ultimately shuts down his young rival who, at best, is a writer of bagatelles:
Most think what has been heap’d on You,
To other sort of Folk was due:
Rewards too great for your Flim-Flams,
Epistles, Riddles, Epigrams. (105-108)
In a decisive attempt to expose the paucity of the upstart’s talents, Swift equates – and splices together – Delany’s poetry with Smedley’s:
21 How different is this from Smedley?
(His Name is up, he may in Bed lye)
“Who only asks some pretty Cure,
In wholesome Soil and Æther Pure;
The Garden stor’d with artless Flowers,
In either Angle shady Bowers:
No gay Parterre with costly Green,
Must in the Ambient Hedge be seen;
But Nature freely takes her Course,
Nor fears from him ungrateful Force:
No Sheers to check her sprouting Vigour,
Or shape the Yews to Antick Figure.” (47-58)
The quoted passage (from line 49 onward) again comes from Smedley’s Epistle to Grafton.38
Within Swift’s poem the appropriated lines stand as an extended metaphor for compromised poetry: greedy pretenders poison the soil and air in which the flower of genius sprouts so artlessly and effortlessly. A case in point: despite the whimsicality of Delany’s ‘Poetick Place’, he will surely struggle with the pastoral mode, as we might infer from Swift’s goading, patronising tone:
Beneath a dry Canal there lies,
Which only Winter’s Rain supplies.
Oh! cou’d’st thou, by some Magick Spell,
Hither convey St. Patrick’s Well;
Here may it re-assume its Stream,
And take a Greater Patrick’s Name. (89-94)
22 Having made personal advice so public, Swift’s firm-handed intervention in Delany’s career incited a huge wave of baiting verse directed against the young satirist (and incidentally against Swift).
There appeared An Answer to the Christmas Box, which, under the pretence of being written by
Rupert Barber, husband of the poet Mary Barber (another friend of Swift’s), was probably the work of Thomas Sheridan. Within a matter of weeks or months there followed Some Seasonable Advice to Doctor D—n—y, A Letter of Advice to the Revd. D—r D—la—y, The Goddess Envy to Doctor
D—l—y, A Vindication of the Libel on Dr Delany – by Swift’s protégé William Dunkin – and countless others. Swift himself extended his epistle on the epistle with ‘A Libel on Dr Delany’, which freely alluded to Delany’s original. Its opening – ‘Deluded Mortals, whom the Great / Chuse for Companions tete à tete’ – seems to deliberately, and immediately, pick up from Delany’s account of Carteret’s soirees for the social climbers.
Long attributed to Swift, A Panegyric on the Reverend D—n S—t, In Answer to the Libel on
Dr D—y, and a Certain Great L—d, appears to be a clever pastiche by James Arbuckle, even if
Williams considers Faulkner to be ‘almost certainly mistaken’ in attributing it to him.39 Curiously, this poem mimics Swift mimicking Delany:
Could all we little Folks that wait,
And dance Attendance on the Great,
Obtain such Privilege as you,
To rail, and go unpunish’d too;
And treat our Betters like our Slaves,
And all Mankind as Fools, or Knaves.
The Pleasure of so large a Grant
Would much compensate all we want. (1-8)
23 Here the poet extends Delany’s complaints with a more outspoken attack on the complacent Dean, while also plundering Swift’s works: his poem ends with ‘The Angels of your awful Nods, /
Resembling you as Angel Gods’, a showy rejoinder to Swift’s closing statement in ‘A Libel on Dr
Delany’ that ‘[…] Statesmen by ten thousand odds / Are ANGELS, just as — are GODS’. There are even frequent sarcastic references to one of the most divisive aspects of Gulliver’s Travels (‘To pay him Honour due, in Course / I must compare him to a Horse’). Arbuckle also reiterates Smedley’s attack on the Dean’s perceived lack of faith (‘[…] an old grave Don / Believ’d in GOD, and you in none’) and discredits the parasitical, privileged nature of Swiftian satire (‘How amply then does
Pow’r provide / For you to gratify your Pride?’). Against this attack on himself, as well as the many attacks on Delany, Swift countered with ‘To Doctor D—l—y, on the Libels Writ Against Him’.
Careering over a wide medley of topics that seem to have recently preoccupied the author, the poem settles on what might be taken as a direct silencing of Arbuckle’s – if not his own – A Panegyric, and an affirmation of the satirist’s pride:
On me, when Dunces are satyrick,
I take it for a Panegyrick.
Hated by Fools, and Fools to hate,
Be that my Motto, and my Fate. (169-72)
In the body of the poem, though, Swift’s speaker concedes that great poets, from Homer down to
Pope inclusive, attract critics as naturally as a hare does a fox or geese do a wolf. As he notes in a startling passage reminiscent of the human waste generated by the lords and ladies and rustics at
Market Hill, the poeticised home of the doddering Dean and his dubious legacy:
When Jove was, from his teeming Head,
Of Wit’s fair Goddess brought to Bed,
24 There follow’d at his lying-in
For after-birth a Sooterkin;
Which, as the Nurse pursu’d to kill,
Attain’d by Flight the Muses Hill;
There in the Soil began to root,
And litter’d at Parnassus’ Foot. (115-21)
From hence, on the befouled muses’ hill, the ‘Critick Vermin sprung, / With Harpy Claws, and
Pois’nous Tongue, / Who fatten on poetick Scraps’. Critics have their place alongside the poets, just as we cannot distinguish an individual mite in rotten cheese or the flea that has bitten us. Indeed,
Swift rubbishes any claim that Delany has been “libelled” at all (‘Let us know / What senseless
Cockscomb told you so’), for verse libel is merely envious praise.
Needless to say, Swift was far more protective of his own stock. Seemingly left in the hands of the anonymous and the cowardly, the outhouse temples in ‘Panegyrick’ function as ironic monuments to the transience of the Dean’s fame and the perishability (and therefore preciousness) of his texts. Smedley’s Lay may be of more use in the jakes, but, more disconcertedly, it threatens to outlive Swift’s corpus. After all, Smedley’s Gulliveriana cynically counterfeited Swift’s and
Pope’s joint Miscellanies in Verse and Prose. In this putative fourth volume extension of ‘odd
Scraps’ Smedley (anonymously) savages his rival’s merits as a versifier, among other things: ‘Low, groveling Poetry all of it; and I challenge all the World, to shew one good Epic, Elegiac or Lyric
Poem of his; one Eclogue, Pastoral, or anything like the Antients’. Swift’s ventriloquized excursions into different forms as the Lady, with her snapshot mimicries of the classics, might offer a quick reply to Smedley’s accusation that Swift ‘can’t write like them’. But ultimately Swift embraces his low style in the face of Smedley’s insistence that Swift’s ‘Doggrel [sic] and Burlesque had Banish’d him [from] Rome, notwithstanding he is so often huzza’d in Dublin’.40 Literalising the metaphor of rubbish writing in ‘Panegyrick’, the muck of modern ‘Off’rings’ cling all too
25 insistently to the ‘tarnish’d Lace’ of the petticoats, burying the ancients beneath the detritus of a post-heroic age. In a late Market Hill piece, ‘An Epistle to a Lady, Who desired the Author to make
Verses on Her, in the Heroick Stile’, the unwelcome poet-in-residence refuses his hostess’s request to ‘suspend a While, / That same paultry Burlesque Stile: […] / Sing my Praise in Strain sublime’.
By recycling the waste paper of his rivals and peers Swift finally assures his legacy in Ireland not as the Drapier but as the vexatious Dean.
1 This paper was delivered at the annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2016. I wish to thank the panel chair, Professor James McLaverty, and the attendees for their suggestive questions and comments. On Swift’s life at Market Hill see James Woolley, ‘Swift’s “Skinnibonia”: A New Poem from Lady Acheson’s Manuscript’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), 309-42, and Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols (London: Methuen, 1962-83), 3:600-609, 623-27, and 666-77. 2 Swift to Pope (6 March 1729), The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963-65), 3:313. Swift had recently outlined a manifesto of sorts when discussing his ongoing work on Gulliver’s Travels in a letter to Pope (29 September 1725): ‘the chief end I propose to my self in all my labors is to vex the world rather then divert it [sic]’, Correspondence, 3:102. 3 Peter J. Schakel suggests forty-six poems can be attributed to the years 1728-30, more than any other three-year period of Swift’s life: ‘Swift’s Voices: Innovation and Complication in the Poems Written at Market Hill’, in Eighteenth- Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, and Stephen E. Karian (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 114-32. More than twenty of the poems were probably written at Market Hill, he adds (130n7). 4 Swift to Pope (16 July 1728), Correspondence, 2:293-94. 5 Unless stated otherwise, Swift’s poems are cited from The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). 6 Maurice Johnson compares the metre of ‘My Lady’s Lamentation’ with the ragged doggerel of John Skelton in The Sin of Wit: Jonathan Swift as a Poet (Ann Arbor: Gordian Press, 1966), 23. 7 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001; first published in 1621): ‘troubled in mind upon every small occasion, unquiet, still complaining, grieving, vexing, suspecting, grudging, discontent, and cannot be freed so long as melancholy continues’ (388). See Arno Löffler, ‘The Dean and Lady Anne: Humour in Swift’s Market-Hill Poems’, Reading Swift: Papers from the Second Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Richard H. Rodino and Hermann J. Real (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), 113-24 (118-19). 8 Louise K. Barnett, Swift’s Poetic Worlds (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 62. 9 Dustin Griffin compares ‘Panegyrick’ with The Dunciad in Swift and Pope: Satirists in Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 148-49. The Irish poet and memoirist Laetitia Pilkington, an acquaintance of Swift’s, claims that ‘The Dean very frankly owned, he did not think Mr. Pope was so candid to the Merits of other Writers, as he ought to be. I then ventured to ask the Dean, whether he thought the Lines Mr. Pope addresses him with, in the beginning of the Dunciad, were any Compliment to him? […] “I believe, says he, they were meant as such; but they are very stiff;”—’ quoted in The Poetry of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert C. Elliott and Arthur H. Scouten (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1981), 43. 10 Deborah Baker Wyrick, Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 115. 11 Barnett, Swift’s Poetic Worlds, 62. Kelly Anspaugh draws out parallels with John Harrington’s excremental mock encomium Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596): ‘Reading the Intertext in Jonathan Swift’s “A Panegyrick on the Dean”’, Essays in Literature 22.1 (1995): 17-30. 12 Thomas B. Gilmore Jr., ‘The Comedy of Swift’s Scatological Poems’, PMLA 91.1 (1976): 33-43 (34). 13 Edward R. Cronin, ‘A Panegyrick on the Dean’, Revue des Langues Vivantes 37 (1971): 524-33 (530). 14 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Jonathan Swift: The Poetry of “Reaction”’, in The World of Jonathan Swift: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 195-212 (209). 15 Gilmore Jr., ‘The Comedy of Swift’s Scatological Poems’, 41.
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16 Swift was teaching her Milton and mythology: Ehrenpreis, Swift, 3:603. James Woolley expands this list with Plato, Lucretius, and Bacon: ‘Skinnibonia’, 328-29. 17 Barnett, Swift’s Poetic Worlds, 62. 18 Cronin, ‘A Panegyrick on the Dean’, 525. 19 Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 166-68. 20 ‘A Satyr Address’d to a Friend that is about to leave the University, and come abroad in the World’, in The Works of Mr. John Oldham, Together with his Remains, 7th edn (London: Dan. Brown, John Nicholson, Benj. Tooke, and George Strahan, 1710), 281. 21 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1693), 25. 22 Wyrick, Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word, 115-17. 23 Faulkner’s editorial gloss describes Smedley as a ‘very stupid, insolent, factious, deformed, conceited Parson, a vile Pretender to Poetry, preferred by the D. of Grafton for his Wit’. Woolley provides a pertinent overview of Smedley’s biography in his edition of Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, The Intelligencer, ed. James Woolley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 135-36 and 217-19. 24 Swift might have had in mind Aphra Behn’s popular anti-pastoral ‘The Golden Age’, too: ‘Blest age! when ev’ry purling stream / Ran undisturbed and clear, / When no scorned shepherds on your banks were seen, / Tortured by love’. 25 Frederic V. Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 122. 26 Jonathan Swift, The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 824. 27 The Dunciad Variorum, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1973; first printed in 1963), 394. 28 Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes, 123. 29 I am indebted to Bogel’s suggestive unpacking of terminology here (114-15). 30 Mark R. Blackwell, ‘The Two Jonathans: Swift, Smedley and the Outhouse Ethos’, in Locating Swift: Essays from Dublin on the 250th Anniversary of the Death of Jonathan Swift 1667-1745, ed. Aileen Douglas, Patrick Kelly, and Ian Campbell Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 129-49 (132). 31 See The Complete Poems, ed. Rogers, 746-7. Williams prints A Satyr alongside Swift’s ‘A Letter from Dean Swift to Dean Smedley’: Poems, 2:369-71. 32 Williams reproduces Smedley’s piece in Poems, 2:357-60. 33 The Intelligencer 20 (8-19 May 1729), 217-23. 34 Jonathan Smedley, Gulliveriana: or, a Fourth Volume of Miscellanies. Being a Sequel of the Three Volumes, published by Pope and Swift (London: J. Roberts, 1728), xxv. This edition was published on 13 August 1728. 35 The Intelligencer 20 (8-19 May 1729), 222. 36 See Poems, 3:1100-1101. The epigraph to The Ode-Maker, from Hogan-Moganides, or, The Dutch Hudibras, seems especially apt: ‘Having nothing else to do, / He plagues himself and others too’. 37 Smedley’s lines read: ‘Thus I, The Jonathan of Clogher, / In humble Lays, my Thanks to offer, / Approach your Grace, with grateful Heart; / My Thanks and Verse both void of Art: / Content with what your bounty gave; / No larger Income do I crave’, An Epistle to his Grace the Duke of Grafton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (Dublin: J. Carson, 1724), lines 1-6. 38 Swift makes a number of unannounced changes. For example, Smedley has: ‘Let Nature, freely, take her Course, / Nor fear from me ungrateful force’ (lines 39-40). 39 Poems, 2:492. Rogers assigns it to Arbuckle: The Complete Poems, 811. See also Aubrey L. Williams, ‘“A vile Encomium”: That “Panegyric on the Reverend D—n S—t’ and James Woolley, ‘Arbuckle’s “Panegyric” and Swift’s Scrub Libel: The Documentary Evidence’, in Contemporary Studies of Swift’s Poetry, ed. John Irwin Fischer and Donald C. Mell, Jr (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 178-90 and 191-209, and James Arbuckle, Selected Works, ed. Richard Holmes (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 151-58. 40 Smedley, Gulliveriana, xxiii, xx.
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